"It had been two years since I last drank a bottle of the 2020 la Grande Vignolle from Domaine Filliatreau and the wine has blossomed beautifully in the interim. This is a ripe wine by the Filliatreau family’s standards, tipping the scales at fourteen percent alcohol in this hot summer and offering up a deep and beautifully sappy bouquet of black cherries, sweet dark berries, cigar ash, chalky tuffeau soils, juniper berries, a touch of tree bark and a floral topnote of peonies. On the palate the wine is ripe, full-bodied, focused and complex, with a gorgeous core of fruit, good soil signature and grip, chewy tannins and a long, precise and well balanced finish. To my palate, this still remains fairly youthful and I would not hesitate to bury it in the cellar for another five or six years and let its tannins soften up more, though there is such lovely fruit in the wine today that it is pretty easy to drink already if paired with the right food. Like steaks on the grill if these damn thunderstorms will pass! 2024-2045+. "